The invention relates to: a data processing apparatus for data processing an audio signal, to a data processing method, a transmitter comprising the data processing apparatus, a transmitter in the form of a recording apparatus, a record carrier, to second data processing apparatus for reconverting an input signal into a replica of the audio signal, to a receiver including the second data processing apparatus, and to a receiver in the form of a reproducing apparatus and to a transmission signal including a data compressed residual bitstream signal.
Data processing an audio signal is well known in the art. Reference is made in this respect to EP-A 402,973, document D1 . The document describes a subband coder, in which an audio signal is A/D converted with a specific sampling frequency, such as 44.1 kHz, and the resulting samples in the form of eg. 24 bits wide words of the audio signal, are supplied to a subband splitter filter. The subband splitter filter splits the wideband digital audio signal into a plurality of relatively narrow band subband signals. Using a psycho acoustic model, a masked threshold is derived and blocks of samples of the subband signals are subsequently quantised with a specific number of bits per sample for each block of the subband signals, in response to the masked threshold, resulting in a significant data compression of the audio signal to be transmitted. The data compression carried out is based on `throwing away` those components in the audio signal that are inaudible and is thus a lossy compression method. The data compression described in document D1 is a rather intelligent data compression method and requires a substantial number of gates or instructions, when implemented in hardware or software respectively, so that it is expensive. Moreover, the subsequent expansion apparatus also requires a substantial number of gates or instructions, when realized in hardware or software respectively. Those skilled in the art are directed to: "A digital decimating filter for analog-to-digital conversion of hi-fi audio signals", by J. J. van der Kam in Philips Techn. Rev. 42, no. 6/7, April 1986, pp. 230-8, document D2; "A higher order topology for interpolative modulators for oversampling A/D converters", by Kirk C. H. Chao et al in IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems, Vol 37, no. 3, March 1990, pp. 309-18, document D3; "A method for the construction of minimum-redundancy codes", by D. A. Huffman in Proc. of the IRE, Vol. 40(10), September 1952, document D4; "An introduction to arithmetic coding" by G. G. Langdon, IBM J. Res. Develop., Vol. 28(2), March 1984, document D5; "A universal algorithm for sequential data compression" by J. Ziv et al, IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory, Vol. IT-23, 1977, document D6; EP patent application no. 96202807.2, filing date Oct. 10, 1996 (PHN 16.029), document D7.
The above citations are hereby incorporated in whole by reference.